Review – Star Trek Into Darkness

The Star Trek franchise has always been known for its thoughtfulness while being grounded in the human experience of scientific endeavors and exploration; the core of all great science fiction. Director JJ Abrams delivered a blockbuster with brainpower with his 2009 reboot ‘Star Trek’. The spectacle remains in the sequel ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ but the IQ takes a massive nose dive.

The crew of the Enterprise is sent to a hostile part of the universe to track down an individual who has declared war on the United Federation of Planets after a series of attacks on Federation buildings on Earth.

Abrams’ Trek universe is still a very cool place to be and the visuals are spectacular. The sleek Enterprise glides through beautiful solar systems and the vastness of space fills your mind with wonder of the endless possibilities. When on the bridge of any ship you just want to jump through the screen and press every button, take the ships for a spin and fire every laser. Abrams drops a massive payload of action into the film and you can almost time the frequency of phaser battles, spaceship dogfights and futuristic ninja moves to every 15-20 minutes. It’s relentless but thrilling.

The chemistry between the main cast is the strongest element of ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ and proves how crucial this ensemble is to the success of the new era of films. Watching Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), Bones (Karl Urban), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin) interact with each other is a joy. Everyone gets the perfect one-liner or moment to shine and there is character progression in all these little moments as we get to know our travel companions better. You feel it might pay off in later films if the series continues in its current form. On the flip side, the newbies don’t fare so well with Dr Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) showing up as the grating character with all the expositional dialogue whose only memorable contribution is a scene where she strips down to her underwear. Eve’s character shows that screenwriters Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof can’t seem to write more than one decent female character into the film beyond Uhura and resort to literally stripping down the character when they run out of exposition. The villain played by Benedict Cumberbatch brings intensity to the film but has barely anything decent to work with beyond the mundane intricacies of a vague revenge plot and “you killed my blah blah blah”. There are moments where Cumberbatch is so aggressive that his mouth moves furiously, while keeping his head still, and he looks like an old-fashioned ventriloquist dummy.

The story is where ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ almost goes supernova. The film’s overarching theme is the prospect of the Federation using its technology for peace or warfare. It’s almost like a commentary on the state of the Star Trek franchise itself, the peaceful futuristic vision of the series creator Gene Roddenberry verses the mindless action film muscle that hogs so much of the runtime to appeal to the widest possible audience. It’s a complete contradiction of itself when characters are condemning the fierce tactics of their enemies while our heroes are detonating anything with a fuel cell. There’s even a scene where Scotty points out that they’re supposed to be explorers, which is a valid point and with such a vast cosmos to discover, Orci, Kurtzman and Lindelof can’t seem to cut the umbilical cord to Earth. For this reviewer the real pain came from Abrams and his screenwriters messing around with the newly created timeline (created from the time travelling exploits of the first film) to produce a few truly awkward moments that pillage from Trek film canon. If you’ve done your homework you’ll recognise the crimes while the uninitiated may enjoy forging their own lore as the franchise picks up new fans.

Abrams gets lazy throughout borrowing many similar scenes from the first film such as a cloud covered Enterprise, an extreme space skydiving sequence and a token Leonard Nimoy cameo (it was fun the first time but it just feels laboured now). Abrams even gets so lethargic that he relies on a scene with a ten second countdown to diffuse a bomb that comes right down to the wire. Of all the stars, in the vastness of space and with almost limitless technology, creativity is still stuck at “cut the red wire”.

‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ is a cosmic fireball of epic proportions. It’s fun to watch but it’s mostly just as empty as space dust.

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3 thoughts on “Review – Star Trek Into Darkness”

“JJ Abrams delivered a blockbuster with brainpower with his 2009 reboot ‘Star Trek’.” Huh? How did the last movie have brainpower? A bad guy with insufficient motivations to justify his actions, a nonsensical plan (if he’s back in time, why not solve his problem instead of waiting 25 years for vengeance?), the newest starship in the fleet commanded by new Academy graduates (at one point, the most senior person on the bridge is 17 year old Chekov; this kid wouldn’t be allowed to run a McDonald’s, but he’s in sole control of Star Fleet’s newest and most powerful ship), a silly and unnecessary time travel story (if you want to reboot Star Trek, just reboot it; don’t justify it with a crappy story).

And don’t even get me started on the science. Trek has never been scientifically rigorous, but it least it understood that stars are light years apart. The movie disregarded science so much that it was more akin to Lost In Space than Star Trek.

Well it’s all a matter of opinion: I think the 2009 ‘Star Trek’ film was a fantastic miracle in the same way the non cinema (ie with the ‘extra’ 40 MINUTES! per film cut out of the cinema versions for commercial reasons) the Lord of the Rings films were. Brilliant poetic films! The cuts and changes to the ‘Lore’ or cannon in both S.T. and LOTR were necessary: I love reading the Tom Bombadil section of the LOTR when reading the book and my boy loves the character too; But even he sees why it was necessary to ‘move on’.
You call Star Trek (2009) a ‘crappy story’ while I thought it profound and well motivated.where it mattered (planet Vulcans destruction was to FORCE a new dynamic on the ‘reboot’ universe while preserving the elements that make up the original Star Trek; which is superior to Star Wars both intellectually and morally.
Some want nostalgia; which is creative death; and others it’s opposite; easy mind drifting entertainment which leads to the same mess. In my mind the reboots do both elements well and without a planet of Vulcan both vulcans, the Federation vs Klingons and Romulans and other issues will take on another balance and form; leaving a lot of great possibilities to the future. (for example the Romulan Vulcan connection and new peace/interbreeding possibilities for example!!)
BUt you need to continue the moral , personal and emotional qualities of the original Star Ttrek or you may as well do something else. JJ Abrams has done that; just as between 2005 and 2009 RT Davis successfully remade and upgraded Dr Who but now the show has returned to the ‘child’s entertainment division of a the new Cameron era as *Downtown Abbey in a Tardis’ and the show is already irrelevant again.
Be grateful that JJ Abrams has chosen to take the necessary risks of destroying something to preserve the marrow for future growth while making the effort to make sure the characters have the souls of the original TOS (the best!) characters and the same moral questions to answer.
The only film apart from ‘Lincoln’ am really looking forwards to this year, (though I do hope ot see a few I am not expecting to see that are great surprises too).

As a matter of principle, I have no problem with a clean reboot. I thought it was dumb to have a “fake” reboot, saying “Trek canon is intact, but a guy went back in time and altered history and that’s why my stories are inconsistent with the old ones.”

Putting fresh Academy graduates in charge of the Enterprise was painful to watch. It was like a Saturday morning cartoon of “Jimmy Kirk and His Space Cadet Pals.” I became sensitized to such things by Babylon 5, which took the military very seriously. I kept thinking “JMS would never have put a 17 year old on the bridge of a starship, let alone left him in charge.” “JMS would never have had Kirk promoted to captain less than one year out school.”

Another absurdity: Spock orders Kirk thrown off the ship (instead of locked in the brig) and his crew actually obeys the obviously illegal command.

As for motivations: Nero complains more about his wife dying than his world being destroyed. But for his wife’s death, he’ll destroy two planets and commit genocide against two species? In the comic book prequel, Nero was portrayed as a nice and intelligent guy before he lost his wife. And yet his reaction to losing his wife is infinitely worse than Khan’s (and Khan was a brutal tyrant, not a nice guy).

Then there’s a scientific error that’s crucial to the story: Romulus, with faster-than-light travel, is taken by surprise by a distant supernova and everyone is killed by it. Huh? How is that possible?

What infuriates me (and yes, the movie has left me angry and bitter – I know, I should get a life) is that none of the stupidity was necessary. The reboot could’ve been done without time travel. Just say “this is a reboot”. Romulus could’ve been destroyed by, I dunno, a Doomsday Machine that the Federation could’ve stopped but didn’t – or something that isn’t obviously illogical. Without time travel, Nero’s vengeance would make sense, because he can’t go back in time and save his world. After everyone graduates from the Academy, there could’ve been a title screen saying “Ten Years Later…”.

The movie was advertised as “not your father’s Star Trek”. Well, the “father” is a reference to people like me. Abrams was saying “Bob, this Trek is not for you.” He was saying to today’s kids “this Trek is not for those uncool nerds who watched the original – it’s for cool guys like you”. And all I can think is “yeah, this Trek is for people who don’t care if movies make any sense of have any deeper meaning.”

The new Trek is NOT intelligent, and I think it’s a deliberate decision on the part of the writers and director to make it loud and dumb.